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Buy Locally, Have Fun!

Hi,
This is my first blog for the San Diego Zoo’s conservation program. I’m glad to be a part of it and hope that you find my experience in responsible living interesting.

I’ve been an active recycler for most of my life. I learned it from my grandpa, who had to survive through the Great Depression of the 1930s. But whomever you learn it from, I encourage you to find ways to reduce how much we all needlessly consume and then discard in our landfills.

Okay…enough lecturing. Let’s have some fun!

Years ago, I threw my little sister in a composter ,and she didn’t decay for weeks, but the fertilizer that she became made my vegetables and flowers grow to record heights! Okay…so maybe it was just a daydream I had when she was bugging me one day, but it reminds me of my thought today which is “keep it close to home.”

One of the easiest things anyone can do to help the environment is “buy locally.” Farmer’s markets are fun to stroll through and bump into friends, maybe share a cup of coffee, and buy some food from a variety of vendors for dinner that week. If you’ve ever done something like that, then congratulations! You have made a step toward improving our standard of living.

How, you say? This is how: every supermarket trucks in tens of thousands of pounds of food to stock on their shelves. These trucks clog our highways, use excessive amounts of fossil fuels, spew toxic emissions that affect the lungs of humans and animals alike, and drive up the prices for food to cover the tremendous expense for all this transporting.

By buying locally produced foods (all foods at farmer’s markets are locally grown) that are not all “super-packaged” helps in a great way. So, thank you, well done!

1 Comment for Buy Locally, Have Fun!

Nofreerides | May 8, 2010 at 10:22 pm

Sorry Mr. Cranston but you must have missed Economics 101 in your quest of fame and fortune. The fact that we in the U.S. have access to a greater variety, better quality, vastly greater quantities, and very inexpensive food, is due in large part to our ability and willingness to provide market access to farmers and food producers, no matter the region, through our interstate highway system and those trucks that you so lovingly demonized.